Yesterday evening we were privileged to have Czech President Vaclav Klaus as our keynote speaker at the Heartland Climate Conference at the Chicago Hilton. The man is a star. He is absolutely sound on my two main issues — the EU, and Climate Change.

I had hoped to ask him about energy in Central Europe — Poland is very worried about the threat to its vital coal interests from Brussels regulation — and about Germany, which has recently decided to shut down its base-load nuclear power industry, and to try to replace it with intermittent wind power.

In the event my old friend Professor Fred Singer got in first with the Central Europe question, but I was able to ask about Germany. I won’t try to repeat the President’s answer verbatim, but he was clearly not happy with Germany’s plans. The occasional surges of power when the wind does blow is creating significant problems for the adjacent Czech Republic.

Many of us have been encouraged by the way that the climate debate seems to have slipped off the public radar. Al Gore has complained that people just don’t seem to want to hear about it. President Obama mentioned climate change in his recent State of the Union speech, and his audience seemed deeply unimpressed. In a recent opinion poll, American voters rated climate change bottom of a list of environmental concerns.

But President Klaus takes a different view. He believes that the Warmists are quite happy to see the end of the public debate. They are notoriously reluctant to come out and debate the science. Yet the green policies they want are in any case being taken forward — in the EU by Brussels regulation, and in the USA by law and by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA).

He recalled President Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex” speech decades ago, when he warned that academia risked being hijacked by government funding and public policy pressure. He little realised how prescient his warnings would prove — although it’s not so much the military-industrial complex as the anti-growth, anti-prosperity, anti-capitalist, pro-regulation, pro-global-governance zealots of the green movement, and they may have lost the argument but they’re winning the policy battle.

They’re putting in place policies that drive up the price of energy, undermine competitiveness, destroy jobs, prevent economic recovery, and force families and pensioners into fuel poverty. Worse yet, by relying on intermittent renewable and failing to build the necessary conventional back-up, they ensure that before the end of this decade we will face serious blackouts and power failures. They are jeopardising energy supply, and therefore economic success, for us and for our children. We are voluntarily choosing poverty and long-term economic decline.

Climate Change may be so last century. But the damage done by green policies is a clear and present danger in the 21st century.

11 Responses to President Klaus comes to Chicago

“It could never happen here.”
Well it could. I remember huddling in the 1970s over a tiny coal fire.
This time, we have central heating which has a dependence on electricity, a microwave, computers and TV.
Yesterday on TV, they were discussing the future of energy and they never even mentioned fracking!
They also assumed that global warming was real.

In our country where there is a parliament, this is puzzling. Why are people so stupid?
In the EU, of course, there is no democracy and people live in a tiny bubble where you have to believe what the bubble believes however silly. I understand that.

The people aren’t stupid. Some of the MPs understand it too. But the Party machines are terrified of admitting they were wrong. Of course UKIP has a rational energy policy — one of the key reasons I joined.

Absolutely Mr. Helemer, you hit the nail on the head with that one !!!
So called, “Political advisors” though are the ones who are in fear,
because they are the one’s who jumped onto this bandwagon, and
are persisting in the hokum advice, realising that they could be sacked
if the real truth is made known “officially” to Governement Ministers.
This is true for ALL countries, I think. Meanwhile though see the
Vaclav Klaus video for yourself.

The politicos’ responsibility is, basically, to seek the best deal for all the voters, rather than promote their personal agenda.
High time we had some opponents of the Green agenda, including the renewables scams, in Parliament.
In Scotland, we see the SNP prospects offering shackling to the moribund but still vicious near-corpses of the EU and renewables, despite likely plentiful shale gas in the UK.
Alex Salmond is basing his near one-man-band Party’s appeal on the above policies, along with whipped-up anti-English xenophobia: what a terrible platform!

Alex Salmond is dangerous since the supporters of his party do so out of a belief that they are supporting Nationalism without realising the cost in terms of both energy and jobs. I suspect that free universities and care for the old will be the first casualties of overspend on renewables.

The ScotNat Policy Statement indicates that by 2020 Salmond hopes to have 13,000 Mw of wind with just 4,633 MW to provide ‘back-up’. What happens when the wind doesn’t blow?

I am English and have only been to Scotland once when I ate neaps and a haggis because nobody had ever told me what goes into the precious sausage which, as the poet sayeth is the prulloch (?) of the pudding race.

So, as a Scottish expert, I would very much like to say that, just as Greece is in terrible difficulties because nobody is going to support it financially when too many Greeks have got used to living off the State without enough taxes or exports to pay the bills, so, in exactly the same way, Scotland risks being in the same desperate position. When the SNP finally float away into Europe, adopt the Euro and become truly independent, they will be in exactly the same plight as Greece is at the moment – broke and unable to leave the Euro.

At the moment, London pays a slab of money for Scotland. The Germans will simply refuse to cough up. But they will insist that the State stops paying out all that money to the many, many State sponsored beneficiaries in the land of Robert Burns and Bannockburn.

Alex Salmond and that lady whose name I currently forget, however, will be Prime Minister (until he is replaced by the EU). Meanwhile, as ever, the more talented Scots will be looking abroad to Brussels and London.

our political representatives have a responsibility to us…firstly to engage their brains and then listen to the arguments and ask questions when appropriate…not to accept being spoon-fed propaganda from industries which has a vested interest in putting only one side to any story. In SW Scotland we are in danger of being swamped by industrial sized turbines both in “farms” and on farms, whilst they bleed us white with the subsidies in our power bills.

For twenty years now, I’ve been callling it the “environmental-industrial complex”. The green agenda will never be satisfied; they will incessantly foment crisis and create rules to justify and promote their cause to the detriment of liberty, freedom, property, etc., even when there is nothing left to take.

Wind-turbines and Global Warming Myths. I would like to add the following comments:
1) that not only is there a realisation that we as a nation cannot afford to pursue trying to minimise global warming, there is more and more understanding about the subject that this is to all intent and purposes just a myth. The scientist who started it off (Lovelock) now admits that he overstated the case and many more scientists say that we are now heading for global cooling cycle, not a warming cycle.
2) more to the point is that wind turbines offer very little in the way of carbon emissions savings when you take all the carbon footprint elements of their manufacture, construction, operation and maintenance into account. Additionally, the equivalent capacity of conventional generation still has to be retained or new power stations built to cater for the fact that wind turbines give intermittent outputs and practically zero output on the coldest days when electricity demand is the highest. Therefore the carbon footprint of a large proportion of the back-up and regulating reserve generation required for the balancing the energy requirements to contain the intermittency of wind turbines should be levied against wind turbines
3) Ofgem, DECC and European inexperienced power planners are now proposing more interconnectors with Europe at exhorbitant costs. Alex Salmond has even been spouting forth that Scotland is in negotiations with Norway for a pumped storage scheme built in Norway and connected by submarine cable to Scotland to deal with wind turbine intermittencies. There would be over 20% transmission losses and a higher order of losses for pumping and generation cycling. Therefore, possibly only 50% to 60% turn round efficiency and if you add the wind-turbine inefficiencies this becomes an extremely wasteful process.

It seems to me that the politicians have totally lost the plot as they are out of their depth on practically every front trying to cover their mistakes of commiting us and Europe to an unlawful carbon emissions reduction target of 20% by 2020 with no way of achieving this unless more nuclear power plants are built to replace and exceed the capacity of the older ones that are heading for decommissioning.

At least if we built newer and bigger nuclear power stations on existing sites, no new transmission lines would be required. Additionally, the government is claiming that gas-fired power stations are not clean when in fact they are considerably cleaner, more efficient and more flexible than coal-fired power stations, and as we will always need very flexible balancing reserves at the operational margins, gas-fired power stations would be most efficient at doing this if they were specifically designed for purpose.

The BBC last night, and obviously Ed Davey DECC minister, were implying gas costs would rise significantly when we know that the exploitation of shale gas in the United States has lowered prices their by 50%. We have 250 years of shale gas reserves in and around Britain, surely if these reserves were exploited the same would apply here and gas prices would fall.

Most of the general public now do not believe or trust the government because they are simply spinning the wind-turbine myth to their own agendas.

‘You can fool some of the people some of the time’
‘But not all of the people all of the time’.

George, I am a retired civil engineer. I started and finished my career working on hydro schemes. I am not an expect on electrical generation.

I would welcome your view on the ScotNat’s Policy Document; particularly the aim to have 13,000 MW of wind power by 2020 when this is to be ‘backed-up’ by just 4,633 MW of fossil fuel and hydro plants?